Nancy Sinatra – Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) - 1966

Just remember, when you’re feeling like a useless failure, that the most common enzyme on earth, the one vital to survival ON THIS PLANET, can’t even do its job correctly half the time, and when it does fail, it fails so hard that it literally produces poison.

You might fail, but you will never fail as hard as Rubisco.

Picture courtesy of @alligatorweather

“Life finds a way” - even if it has to get through dear hamfisted lil’ RuBisCO first. 

Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower

(via literarytomhardy)

Happy birthday America

The why of it: our mission & hope

“And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.” - Maggie Nelson, Bluets 

We are fans of Victorian literature in general and Thomas Hardy in particular. Thomas Hardy is a brilliant writer and observer of the natural world. His characters work in and alongside the earth, and though Hardy’s books explore very human themes – crossed love, death, the rise and fall of fortunes and families – Hardy never lets the reader or his characters forget that they are under a vast, mysterious, beautiful firmament, a firmament and earth that is at best indifferent to the minute workings of human endeavor.

Thomas Hardy is also a writer very much of his time. Though Thomas Hardy is considered a novelist of the New Woman, who expanded traditional images of the Victorian woman and subverted the “angel in the house” trope, contemporary readers of Hardy might feel Hardy’s depiction of what he characterizes as womanly faults, as well as his valorizing of certain traditionally masculine traits leaves something to be desired. For the Victorians (and much of the Western canon), polite society and the interactions between women and men were bound by an intricate social code upon which they believed the very fabric of society depended. Unsurprisingly, this involved, in part, the control of women’s sexuality and the relegation of the woman to the home (as well as a whole lot of constrictive undergarments). Hardy, to his credit, is very far beyond his time in his depiction of women – for example, his heroine Bathsheba, in Far From the Madding Crowd, manages her own farm and makes bold forays into the world of men. Pretty radical stuff for the time!

Still, because nobody’s perfect psychic, that prescient move toward equality is sometimes overtaken by some bogus gender essentialism. Even Hardy indulges in a few unfair or absurd proclamations about what women do, and what they are like (remember Jude Fawley falling prey to Arabella’s cunning?). Therefore, in the spirit of Hardy’s egalitarian views of womanhood, and because we’re here to celebrate Hardy’s brilliance and not to bag on him for not anticipating Third-wave feminism, we’re playfully retrofitting the Victorian male gaze with a healthy dose of the female gaze. 

It’s not just about eye-candy in a general sense. Tom Hardy (actor, dog lover, bearer of children and intricately layered tattoos) is another one of our healthy obsessions. He’s an ideal candidate for this project for a few reasons besides the silly coincidence that he shares a name with one of our favorite writers. For one thing, he’s a guy interested in dichotomized-yet-fluid public concepts of masculinity and femininity; he’s also spoken eloquently about his desire to shape his image, the contrast between inner life and appearance.

“I don’t feel rugged and strong and capable in real life, not how I imagine a man ought to be,” he told Esquire. “So I seek it, to mimic it and maybe understand it, or maybe to draw it into my own reality.”

Not for nothing: he also won over our hearts with his entirely nonplussed responses to questions about his decentralized position in the revolutionary matriarchal text Mad Max: Fury Road.

And beyond that, Tom Hardy is also a millennial baby who is old enough to have a Myspace page and to have remnants of his half-naked bathroom selfies trailing around in the wake of his now much more curated (or – differently curated) public persona. Tom Hardy makes visible the illusion of celebrity perfection, because he carries these past selves and (thus far) allows them to visibly haunt and trail his movie star persona. In short, he has a doofy side, and he’s not tried to bury or disown that as he’s matured into his career. We adore this.

So – in the spirit of feminist reclamation of a single (male-written) story of the feminine, we lovingly gather all of Tom Hardy’s messy, disparate selves together (or, if not all the selves, as many selves as we can carry) in hearty appreciation of all that is wholly, chaotically, naturally human. We hope the Hardy boys would approve.

Gonna reblog this oneeeeee more time because this project gives me purpose and life. 

The why of it: our mission & hope

“And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.” - Maggie Nelson, Bluets 

We are fans of Victorian literature in general and Thomas Hardy in particular. Thomas Hardy is a brilliant writer and observer of the natural world. His characters work in and alongside the earth, and though Hardy’s books explore very human themes – crossed love, death, the rise and fall of fortunes and families – Hardy never lets the reader or his characters forget that they are under a vast, mysterious, beautiful firmament, a firmament and earth that is at best indifferent to the minute workings of human endeavor.

Thomas Hardy is also a writer very much of his time. Though Thomas Hardy is considered a novelist of the New Woman, who expanded traditional images of the Victorian woman and subverted the “angel in the house” trope, contemporary readers of Hardy might feel Hardy’s depiction of what he characterizes as womanly faults, as well as his valorizing of certain traditionally masculine traits leaves something to be desired. For the Victorians (and much of the Western canon), polite society and the interactions between women and men were bound by an intricate social code upon which they believed the very fabric of society depended. Unsurprisingly, this involved, in part, the control of women’s sexuality and the relegation of the woman to the home (as well as a whole lot of constrictive undergarments). Hardy, to his credit, is very far beyond his time in his depiction of women – for example, his heroine Bathsheba, in Far From the Madding Crowd, manages her own farm and makes bold forays into the world of men. Pretty radical stuff for the time!

Still, because nobody’s perfect psychic, that prescient move toward equality is sometimes overtaken by some bogus gender essentialism. Even Hardy indulges in a few unfair or absurd proclamations about what women do, and what they are like (remember Jude Fawley falling prey to Arabella’s cunning?). Therefore, in the spirit of Hardy’s egalitarian views of womanhood, and because we’re here to celebrate Hardy’s brilliance and not to bag on him for not anticipating Third-wave feminism, we’re playfully retrofitting the Victorian male gaze with a healthy dose of the female gaze. 

It’s not just about eye-candy in a general sense. Tom Hardy (actor, dog lover, bearer of children and intricately layered tattoos) is another one of our healthy obsessions. He’s an ideal candidate for this project for a few reasons besides the silly coincidence that he shares a name with one of our favorite writers. For one thing, he’s a guy interested in dichotomized-yet-fluid public concepts of masculinity and femininity; he’s also spoken eloquently about his desire to shape his image, the contrast between inner life and appearance.

“I don’t feel rugged and strong and capable in real life, not how I imagine a man ought to be,” he told Esquire. “So I seek it, to mimic it and maybe understand it, or maybe to draw it into my own reality.”

Not for nothing: he also won over our hearts with his entirely nonplussed responses to questions about his decentralized position in the revolutionary matriarchal text Mad Max: Fury Road.

And beyond that, Tom Hardy is also a millennial baby who is old enough to have a Myspace page and to have remnants of his half-naked bathroom selfies trailing around in the wake of his now much more curated (or – differently curated) public persona. Tom Hardy makes visible the illusion of celebrity perfection, because he carries these past selves and (thus far) allows them to visibly haunt and trail his movie star persona. In short, he has a doofy side, and he’s not tried to bury or disown that as he’s matured into his career. We adore this.

So – in the spirit of feminist reclamation of a single (male-written) story of the feminine, we lovingly gather all of Tom Hardy’s messy, disparate selves together (or, if not all the selves, as many selves as we can carry) in hearty appreciation of all that is wholly, chaotically, naturally human. We hope the Hardy boys would approve.

am i laughing or am i crying

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

(via literarytomhardy)

 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

(via literarytomhardy)

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

(via literarytomhardy)

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

(via literarytomhardy)

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

(via literarytomhardy)

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes

(via literarytomhardy)

Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelbertha

(via literarytomhardy)